Keanu asked Robin what she wanted from life but she was too distracted by a nearby Krispy Kreme van to answer

Cast: Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder
Director: Rebecca Miller
Screenwriters: Rebecca Miller
Rating: 15

Adapted from writer/director Rebecca Miller’s own novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee follows the middle-aged Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) as she moves into a retirement community with her much-older husband (Oscar-winner Alan Arkin). Suddenly awash with free time, Pippa begins to reflect on her earlier life while developing an interest in her neighbour’s taciturn son, played by Keanu Reeves.

Rebecca Miller is certainly an actor’s director and has attracted an incredible ensemble cast. Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively makes the biggest impression in her silver screen career to date as the young Pippa, but it is the older cast who really astound. Julianne Moore and Monica Bellucci show up for brief cameos in roles that nevertheless have the sort of depth and complexity that leading actresses would jump through hoops for. Reeves delivers one of his better performances, albeit in a role that steers carefully short of his limitations, while comeback queen Winona Ryder is nothing short of brilliant as Pippa’s neurotic and unstable friend. Alan Arkin is as reliably excellent as always, although he feels ever so slightly underserved in a typecast role.

Maria Bello steals the earlier parts of the film as Pippa’s drug-addicted mother Suky, but from the moment Pippa declares “I’ve had enough of being an enigma. I want to be known“, Wright Penn really claims the film as her own, delivering a very human performance. Most impressive of all is the way she slowly begins to layer elements of Bello’s Suky and Lively’s Young Pippa into her performance as Pippa reconciles herself with her past, finally embracing all the contradictory sides of her nature and becoming her own woman.

Miller is a fine writer with a skill for finding the profound in banal conversations. Bar a striking sequence symbolising Young Pippa’s drug experimentation and a bizarre animated sequence, most of Miller’s visual quirks are so subtle as to almost go unnoticed. Cleverly, the flashbacks are not heralded by a close up of Pippa’s eyes or a ‘woosh’ sound effect as in so many other cases. Instead, the camera simply drifts off to the side and into another scene that took place 30 years earlier, as though Pippa’s mind has simply strayed away for a moment.

The film also has the challenge of representing three different time periods in Pippa’s life, and these differences are most clearly represented in the ever-shifting colour palette: the candy-coloured cereals of a youth untainted by knowledge of her mother’s addiction, the too-sharp neons of the pills of her teen years, and the muted greys, blues and creams of Pippa’s middle-aged life. Miller also makes great use of space, from the terrifying wide open beaches of a teenage existence with neither boundaries nor security, to a life smothered in the claustrophobia of a retirement community.

Miller still has room to develop as a director, and it would be nice to see her dive headfirst into some of the braver stylistic touches she dips her toes into in this film. For the most part, though, she has crafted a film that may not be groundbreaking in its originality, but which is certainly a rare thing: a film by, for and about women – a chick-flick for grown-ups. The story may hinge on Pippa’s relationship with Herb, but it is really about one woman’s relationship with herself, with her past, present, and with the future that is finally opening up in front of her.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is in cinemas from 10th July via Icon Films